


The Library

by sixbeforelunch



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen, Libraries, Reading, The SGC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-14
Updated: 2019-03-14
Packaged: 2019-11-18 04:50:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18113630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixbeforelunch/pseuds/sixbeforelunch
Summary: It starts with six cases of fiction and grows into much more.





	The Library

**Author's Note:**

  * For [phantomlistener](https://archiveofourown.org/users/phantomlistener/gifts).



In 1999, George Harriman died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-six, leaving behind two daughters, one son, and his wife of fifty-one years.

His only son, Walter, took a plane to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania to attend his father's funeral, and help his mother sort out the business of death, horrible and mundane all at once.

George had been an avid reader right up to his death, and his wife Enid insisted that her son take with him a portion of his father's library. He didn't actually want his father's books, but saying no to his grieving mother was not an option, so he found himself on a sunny but cold Wednesday morning packing up carton after carton of paperbacks. Walter was then going through a messy period in his marriage, which would culminate in a divorce eighteen months later, although he didn't know it at the time. What he did know was that shipping six boxes of books to his then-wife would not do anything to improve the reception he got when he arrived home, so he took the collection to the post office and sent them to Cheyenne Mountain, care of Doctor Daniel Jackson, because in the haze of grief, the only thing his muddled brain could only come out with the fact that Doctor Jackson liked books.

Truth be told, Walter was half-hoping that they would be lost on their way there, but although they took quite a while to make their way through various levels of security, they arrived one morning about two weeks after Walter had returned to work.

Daniel frowned at the delivery and found Walter at his usual post in front of the dialing computer.

"Sergeant? Why did you send me six cases of Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton and a whole bunch of 70s westerns?"

Walter glanced up. "Oh, those. They were my dad's."

"Did he wake up one morning and realize he has a terrible taste in literature?"

"No, he died."

"Oh. I'm, uh, I'm sorry."

Walter sighed. "Can you just put them somewhere? I didn't know what else to do with them. We get locked down kind of a lot. Maybe they'll come in handy next time."

Daniel, sorry for his comment but not so sorry that he was willing to devote much time to a bunch of bad novels, put them in an unused storage room, still in their boxes, and there they stayed until Colonel Reynolds turned purple.

The circumstances leading to Reynolds purple phase, as his team later called it, were never quite clear, but what is clear is that Colonel Reynolds returned from a mission one day purple from head to toe. ("Dong too?" Dave Dixon asked, and Reynolds just nodded.) Since he wasn't in any way ill or, as far as could be determined, contagious, there was no reason to confine him to the infirmary. Since he was purple and (it was later learned) glowed faintly in the dark due to unknown alien causes, there was no question about letting him leave the base.

And so poor Colonel Reynolds wandered the base, purple and glowy, until he stumbled onto the storage closet and, bored out of his mind, decided to organize the books. Reynolds' mother had been a librarian. Shelving books reminded him of his childhood. It soothed him. It soothed him so much in fact, that he decided to give the books a proper home, and found some old metal shelving units sitting disused in one of the labs and spent so much time putting it all together and getting the books to line up just right that he almost failed to notice that he wasn't purple anymore.

After that, the collection started to grow. People cleared out their books and brought some to work. It was mostly romance novels and the previous year's best sellers at first, and then some Dickens, and then Tolkein. Someone brought in books by Rush Limbaugh, and someone else countered with Howard Zinn, and then there was Ayn Rand and Orwell, a microcosm of American political debate playing out on the shelves of the a facility so secret that most Americans had no idea it existed.

The SGC library was, after a time, one of the most prized and well-cared-for spaces on the base. An old recliner made its way into the base one day (General Hammond merely sighed and gave his authorization when the gate guards called to ask if they should allow it; it was subjected to one of the most rigorous security searches ever perpetrated on a piece of furniture). A few favorite pictures from off-world adventures, too mundane to be included in the reports, too alien to be taken home, were framed and hung on the walls. Lamps replaced the ugly fluorescents. When Barnes taught himself to crochet following a broken leg, the recliner acquired an afghan and the library ended up with a collection of amigurumi animals as well.

It was under that afghan, with an amigurumi penguin balanced on the arm of the recliner, that Daniel found Vala one afternoon, quietly reading _Sweet Valley Twins #2: Teacher's Pet_.

"Hey," he said, taking the arm of the recliner and moving the penguin to the back of the chair. "How's the English reading going?"

Vala shrugged. "These books are quite good. Elizabeth is a prig, but I'm growing fond of Jessica."

Daniel used one finger to tilt the book so he could see the cover. "Yeah, that's the toned-down version for children. In _Sweet Valley High_ , Jessica is a complete sociopath." (Daniel had discovered the Sweet Valley High novels at the age of 22, as part of a literacy program that he worked at two days a week to help pay for school. He had been encouraged to read some of the kids favorite books, and because he was a fast reader with a memory for what he read that rarely let anything go no matter how useless, he knew more about Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield than any one person should.)

"Really? Why am I not reading those then?"

"Cassandra might still have her old ones. I can check. The language is a little more advanced, but...not much. You can handle them."

"Hmm." Vala replaced the glittery pink bookmark and set her book aside. She pulled her knees to her chest. She was wearing pajama bottoms and a tank top, and Daniel felt a pang of guilt, knowing that the SGC wasn't exactly the nicest place to call home. "Can I tell you a secret?"

Daniel nodded. 

"Promise not to tell anyone?" Six months ago, Daniel would have considered Vala's almost childlike phrasing manipulative, but he was slowly realizing that underneath the fake vulnerability lay a true vulnerability that Vala was increasingly willing to let them see. He was learning, albeit more slowly than he perhaps should have, to treat that vulnerability with the gentleness it needed.

"I promise."

"Quetesh taught me to read."

The filter between Daniel Jackson's brain and his mouth was frequently far too permeable for either his own or other's comfort, but for once it managed to kick in and tell him that now was not the time to start talking, so he made only a vague noise of encouragement.

Vala looked down. "What I mean is, she didn't teach me so much as the knowledge was in her head and when she was gone, it was still there in mine, but...I didn't know how to read before her."

"Well, the Goa'uld did their best to restrict people from learning to read. A lot of planets--"

"My planet had an educational system. I just hated school, and I was also very stupid."

Daniel frowned and set the penguin on her knees. She grinned at it. "You're a lot of things, Vala, but I don't think stupid is one of them."

Vala didn't say anything. The filter between her brain and her mouth was actually a great deal more robust than people thought, only she had learned a long time ago that if you kept talking about nothing, people didn't always pay attention to what you were doing, and that was frequently useful in her previous line of work. In her present line of work, she had found herself with the space to think before she spoke, and she liked it more than she herself realized.

After a few quiet minutes, Daniel stood up. "I'm heading home."

Vala opened her book. "I'll see you tomorrow," she said. "Close the door on your way out."

Outside, the SGC was a hub of activity. The galaxy spun on, in all it's chaos and wonder. But inside this one small room in the SGC, a library seeded in grief and grown with care, all was quiet and there was peace.

end


End file.
